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Indigenous music

Folk music

African American folk music

The "ring shout" is an African American musical and dance tradition that is among the oldest surviving African American performance styles in North America. The ring shout tradition is rare in the modern Southern United States, but it still found in McIntosh County, Georgia, where black communities have kept the style alive. The McIntosh County ring shout is a counterclockwise ring dance featuring clapping and stick-beating percussion with call-and-response vocals. The ring shout tradition is strongest in Boldon, Georgia (also known as Briar Patch), where it is traditionally performed on New Year's Eve.[1]

The Georgia Sea Island Singers are an important group in modern African American folk music in Georgia. They perform worldwide the Gullah/Geechee music of the Georgia coast and Sea Islands, and have been touring since the early 1900s; the folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax discovered the Singers on a 1959-60 collecting trip and helped to bring their music to new audiences. The Georgia Sea Island Singers have included Bessie Jones, Emma Ramsey, John Davis, Mayble Hillery, and Peter Davis.[2][3]

Multi-instrumentalist Abner Jay, born in Fitzgerald, performed eccentric blues-infused folk music as a one-man band.

Shape-note

The Sacred Harp, first published in 1844, was compiled and produced by Georgians Benjamin Franklin White and Elisha J. King. They helped establish a singing tradition also known as Sacred Harp, fasola, or shape note singing. The Sacred Harp system use notes represented by different shapes according to scale degree, intended to make it easy for people to learn to sight-read music and perform complex pieces without a lot of training.[4] Established in 1933,[5] the Sacred Harp Publishing Company, located in Carrollton, Georgia, publishes the most widely used 1991 edition of The Sacred Harp.[6]Hugh McGraw of Bremen, Georgia, served as the company's executive secretary from 1958-2002 and helped encourage Sacred Harp's recent resurgence in popularity.[7] A Georgia-based music label, Bibletone Records, has reissued a 28-cut CD of Sacred Harp music originally released as LPs by the publishing company.[8]

Rock

The earliest Atlanta-based music maven, Bill Lowery, started the careers of Ray Stevens, Joe South, Jerry Reed, and countless others, and created the first Georgia-based springboard for such talent, National Recording Corporation, sporting not only a record label, but a recording studio and pressing plant. Lowery would later work with the likes of Billy Joe Royal, Mac Davis, Dennis Yost & The Classics IV, and The Atlanta Rhythm Section, giving Atlanta national relevance with his Lowery Music group of publishing companies, one of the world's biggest music publishers. Noted session and touring drummer, Michael Huey, started his career at Bill Lowery studios.

Georgia has contributed to the ska scene with the bands Treephort, 50:50 Shot, and The Taj Motel Trio. Ska punk has seen a recent revival in Georgia with the regional ska festival, the Mass Ska Raid, taking place for the first time in 2008.